


Of Glass and Glitter

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Propaganda, Psychic Propaganda, Shoosh-Papping, Sparkly Posters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 04:42:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early on in the meteor's journey, you still spend time with him. You've found an old poster in the back of your sylladex and it's just you, him and the puppet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Glass and Glitter

**Author's Note:**

> Submission for Round One of HSWC - Propaganda

The poster is framed with tyrian, which bolsters the letters in the center. Back in your hive, on Alternia, it had been pinned there on your wall, in between film posters and schoolfeed notes. It had dribbled tyrian glitter on the floor, and although you had liked your hive to be clean, it didn’t bother you so much. The empire needed everyone, even you. At some point, you’d folded it up and neatly slipped it into the back of your sylladex.

Some of the glitter rubs off on Gamzee’s long paws. It’s old, now. It was old when you got it - the glistening script hardly flashes at all. The parchment it’s printed on bears hardly a single scratch, though, and you realise, now, that it was probably intended to drip glitter everywhere, anyway. There’s some weird throb of admiration somewhere inside you. It cracks through something, and you think that it wasn’t exactly about being in a position to sprinkle your own blood color everywhere. Not exactly.

“The Lady got her motherfucking penchant on for sparkle dust,” says Gamzee, simply. Carefully, he hands it back to you and looks at the pads of his fingers, still dotted with bits of Tyrian. You wonder if she’s dead. “Her color is all what’s hers to be spreading around.”

His voice is low as it ambles in its pitch, and it’s strangely contemplative. Since the moirallegiance began, he’s been equal parts edged and louche. You were used to him being lackadaisical, but now, there still seems to be a sharp wire of tension running through him. He still pads and slouches his way around, but his thin, gangly frame looks to be all razor angles. You put your hand on the hard edge of his shoulder and run your thumb beneath the ridge of his shoulder blade. He makes a quiet noise low in his throat.

“Ain’t no subjugglator ever got to paint their walls with that motherfucking regal kinda purple.” You don’t know whether he sounds faintly awed or faintly wistful. His shoulder hasn’t loosened up, yet, and you keep your fingers moving.

You wonder what Gamzee has done with the corpses he took. You and he will have to go and sort that out, sometime. You haven’t really gotten around to asking him about it. You’ve been carefully sliding it into the ‘Highbloods do some fucking weird shit’ box for now. But you guess being in possession of an heiress’s corpse would send a pretty strong message to the empire.  
“You’d be the first,” you say, your voice low. You decide to press. He angles his shoulder back a little, and you feel a little tension pop in his muscle. You move your fingers along so that your hand is nearer to his neck. You drag your thumb as you go, beginning to circle when you get to below his nape. There’s an ever so slight twist to his body, the length of him moving from his shoulders.

“Don’t say nothing when we’re on this motherfucking space rock, bro,” he says. There’s a circling buzz beneath his words. It hits something inside you and you put aside the poster you have. You move to his other shoulder to hear that buzz deepen. “All motherfucking shades spread across the wall all meaning the same thing. Motherfuckers dead way back had no knowing of that. I got my understand on, better.”

“If it doesn’t mean anything, maybe you can understand that there’s no point in doing it,” you say. You haven’t got your head around the idea that, with the empire gone, your blood could be smeared across the wall and it could be any one of half the meteor.

Gamzee grunts, although it’s low and flattened by the buzzing in his throat. You wait for him to actually say something, but he doesn’t. He’s leaning back into you, now, and the tension in his shoulders is almost gone. His body feels slack again, under your hands, but it’s not time to stop. You trace your fingers down his back and hook them between his ribs. Prominent ribs at that – you guess that toxic slime isn’t exactly highly nutritious.

“We’ll talk about that some other time, then,” you say. It’s not important right now, anyway. You feel the curves of his ribs and the hard grubscars between them. When you only knew him from Trollian, he was only ever a little too purple and a little too unaware of the fact that it was unlikely nobody would ever break his skull open for that. Those things coupled with his overall clownishness had resulted in you not really being able to resolve your image enough to neatly fit him into the lines of a troll.

It was when you had finally met him that you realised this. And then you had become struck with the fact that he was nearly all bones. With the veneer of the slime scraped away, he just looks so incredibly hungry. It creates a hot, sour lump inside you and you want to just turn it over and over. You lower him down by his shoulders, carefully. Gamzee doesn’t say anything but he moves easily and his horns graze gently against you as he settles. The horn pile gives a gentle squeal underneath him.

You’re pretty sure that his horns are weaker than they should be. As a highblood, though, he’s granted durability, at least. Perhaps malnutrition would have been harder on him if he had been any warmer blooded. The only option you have had is to always make sure to take care of yourself. You hook your arms under his and wrap them around him. He’s still buzzing quietly, and you look down and notice that he’s staring up at the dark ceiling. He looks as if he could be staring into nothing, and you used to be so sure that he was. He doesn’t make eye contact even when you tilt your head over his.

He’s left his puppet slumped on the corner of the pile, limp and boneless. It fell with its face tilting up towards you, its pale, glassy eyes meeting yours. Something swells and echoes in the back of your mind and you turn away from it.

“Why do you still have that thing?” It stays, green and white and blank, sickly blue, on the edge of your vision. Gamzee shifts underneath you, and you realise that he hasn’t bathed in a while. It stands to reason that he needs you as much as he does.

“Mmm?” he murmurs. His eyes are half-lidded, now, like they used to be, except the expression beneath them is different – less soft and more gathered.

“That fucking puppet. Why do you still have it?” you say. Gamzee has got seven corpses stashed away somewhere and you’re going for a lump of harmless fibrecords sewn into something that just happens to look like a monstrosity. You’ve got to take this slowly, though.

“He gets my soothe on my motherfucking thinkpan, bro,” he says. You clasp your fingers across him, tightly.

“You have a fucking moirail.” You are terse, and these are the moments in which you don’t really want to be.

“I know, he’s all up and being totally different to you,” he says. “Like, you got your brightshiny poster from the big fishsister and that’s all yours, like what you got to push you out when it was time. Think of all us little motherfuckers back planetside and we were all up and to be going someplace or other. You got your route on. I got mine. Like a motherfucking wiggler getting his comfort on."

You get what he means. You just wish that it wasn’t such a creepy fucking token to pull around.

“What kinda shit did you get?” You never asked. You couldn’t ever picture Gamzee in his hive like a regular troll, and subjugglators had used to seem more alien to you than any other flavour of highblood, so you couldn’t picture what it was like to be one, even one that ate his sopor slime. “I mean, how the hell is that thing reminiscent of anything? It’s a human doll, for a start.”

Gamzee shifts his body back just a little, his long horns catching a little on your sweater. You unclasp your hands from his middle and you notice that you’ve left behind bits of tyrian glitter on his shirt. It’s bright on the faded grey and you’re pretty sure that, unless you make him take it off, he won’t care that he’s covered in glitter and you’ll find bits on him in half a sweep.

“The faith is all up in the thinkpan, brother,” he drawls. You wrap your hands around his horns. They’re smooth enough, but you can feel cracks against your palm. You guess the advantage of small horns is that it’s easier for you to minimise damage. You lower your palms so that they’re against his scalp, each horn between the thumb and forefinger of each of your hands. His hair is tangled and oily, and you think you hear a sigh when you touch him. “In every motherfucking image, in every motherfucking line. Any way what you might use to get on into a clown’s head, to make his pump biscuit get its beat on, that’s what the little bro is being to remind me of.”

Your fingers are slow as they begin to thread between the strands of his hair. You watch a shiver go down his body for a moment, and then he continues. “Sings all up and around in there. It sings so motherfucking loud, no clown can hear himself think.” His voice, you think, is fluctuating a little more abruptly than it usually does, and so you scratch your pads against his scalp until a rumble grows to underline his words. “There’s a void, bro, and the choir all up and fills it.”

You let your fingertips continue to rub against him, all the more frantic.

“Shoosh.” When you do that, he doesn’t say anything else. He trails off, leaving only the rumbling in his chest. “Shooooosh.”

You glance at the puppet again and your nerves bristle. You have a notion, then, that you shouldn’t look away from it, but you’re not sure why. You slow your hands down to a gentle stroke.

“Shoooosh.” This time, it’s as much as comfort for you as it’s supposed to be for him. “Gamzee, I think we’ve grown out of shitty wiggler security boosters, now…maybe we should get rid of them both?”

He doesn’t reply.


End file.
